Emily, our print and color specialist here at Imagekind shares five tips to make sure your giclee prints produce perfectly. We are constantly hearing about how amazing our print quality is and it is in large part due to Emily, Will and our fantastic production team taking care of all the order details. They go through painstaking measures to make sure each print sent from Imagekind is top-notch, museum quality.

Image: DREAMING AGAIN by [ METROFADER ]

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1. The Highest is Best

Be sure that you have the highest quality file possible. This means taking a picture of your painting with the very best camera that you have available, or taking your pieces to be scanned or photographed by a professional. A poorly photographed or scanned piece is going to print poorly. If you do not have the resources to do this yourself, many wonderful companies can do digital capture for a reasonable price. This is the MOST important part of preparing your work, and the number one reason that customers return prints. If your digital file is not high quality, then no matter how wonderful the original photograph or painting is, it will not reproduce well.

Image: Cloud Shop by Matasaburo Kazeno

2. Do Not Resize

Do NOT resize your digital file to increase the size. If your image is not large enough to print at the size that you would like, then you must re-photograph or re-scan it. Resizing it in Photoshop to make it bigger will cause it to become pixilated and obscured with artifacts. Many beginners to giclee printing make this mistake.

3. Make it Sparkle

Be sure your image is print-ready! Remove any dust spots, boost contrast if you need it, sharpen, or add any additional borders before uploading it or sending it to the printer. Giclee prints are very detailed high-resolution reproductions and small flaws have the potential of being visible.

Image: Alone by Brenda Anderson

4. Color it Up

Once you have prepared your image to print, apply a color profile to your image. In layman’s terms, color profiling is how different computers in different environments can talk to each other to reproduce and display images correctly. Choose what profile will work best for your image – a popular one is sRGB. Any profile you choose will be utilized in the color managed giclee print production environment.

Image: Catch the Light by Kelly Cheng

5. Detail Shows

When choosing images to reproduce as prints, almost anything goes! Subtle details and gradations can print wonderfully if you choose the right paper. As long as the piece is photographed and scanned correctly, images with a variety of textures can make incredible prints. We have many very successful prints made from oil paintings and other mediums that include a lot of texture, printed onto fine art canvas or other fine art paper options.